An anonymous donor has paid $175,000 to pay the burial costs of all 21 victims of the Texas school tragedy, according to Texas Governor Greg Abbott.
At a press conference on Friday, Abbott, 64, delivered the news, claiming that all costs will be ‘taken care of.’
‘An anonymous donor who attended the meeting and contributed $175,000 to ensure that every family’s burial expenses are covered,’ he added.
‘No family who is suffering from incalculable heartbreak at this time will have to worry about a single cost with regard to anything concerning this travesty.’
Abbott gave no indication as to who the donor was, although some have speculated about whether it could be Tesla tycoon Elon Musk, who now lives in Austin.
He went on to say that the state will be providing mental healthcare providers giving ‘mental health assistance to anyone in the community who needs it.’
‘When I say anyone that means the totality of anybody who lives in this community. We believe you would benefit from mental healthcare services.’
The Texas also said the mental healthcare services would be free to the public.
‘We just want you to ask for them,’ he lamented. ‘The entire community has been effected by this horrific crime.’
Earlier on Friday. Abbott claims he was lied to about Tuesday’s school massacre after it emerged cops didn’t enter a classroom where the bloodbath was unfolding for 90 minutes.
‘I was misled,’ Abbott said on Friday, addressing a press conference in Uvalde about Tuesday’s shooting at Robb Elementary School which saw 19 students and two teachers murdered by Salvador Ramos, 18, who was eventually shot dead by cops.
‘I am livid about what happened. I was on this very stage two days ago, and I was telling the public information that had been told to me in a room just a few yards from where we are write now. I wrote hand notes in sequential order.
‘When I came out on that stage and told the public what happened, it was a recitation of what everyone told me,’ he said. ‘As everybody has learned, the information I was given turned out – in part – to be inaccurate.
‘I am absolutely livid about that.’
Abbott said that law enforcement leaders must ‘get to the bottom of every fact, with absolute certainty.’
He said it was ‘inexcusable’ that families may have suffered from inaccurate information, and ordered law enforcement to ‘get down to every second what happened, and explain it to the public – but most importantly, to the victims.’
Abbott had defended the actions of the police and other local officials on Wednesday, emphasizing their heroics and insisting they prevented the situation from being far worse.
Yet questions have been rapidly mounting about the actions of law enforcement – in particular, why they waited outside the school for an hour while Salvador Ramos, 18, was free inside the building to murder 19 children and two teachers.
Initially police said that Ramos was wearing body armor and was confronted by an armed guard: on Thursday, they admitted that neither of those facts were true.
They said Ramos was barricaded in a classroom, but it emerged on Wednesday night that the authorities had to get a key to open the door – leading to urgent questions as to why they didn’t break it down.
And they said the delay in entering the school was because they were waiting for negotiators – an excuse that Tucker Carlson, the avowedly pro-law enforcement Fox News host, ridiculed on Thursday night.
Officials admitted on Friday that nearly 20 officers stood in a hallway outside of the classrooms during the attack, believing any potential victims inside were already dead.
‘Of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision,’ Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said at a news conference.
The on-site commander ‘was convinced at the time that there was no more threat to the children and that the subject was barricaded and that they had time to organize’ to get into the classroom, McCraw said.
McCraw said there was a barrage of gunfire shortly after Ramos entered the classroom where they killed Ramos but that shots were ‘sporadic’ for much of the 48 minutes while officers waited outside the hallway.
He said investigators do not know whether or how many children died during those 48 minutes.
Ramos entered the classroom and locked the door at 11.34am.
In the first few minutes, he fired more than 100 shots inside classrooms 111 and 112.
He carried on shooting ‘sporadically’ until 12.21pm, and it wasn’t until 12.50pm that police eventually gained access to the classrooms with a key from the janitor.
Throughout the attack, teachers and children repeatedly called 911 asking for help, including a girl who pleaded: ‘Please send the police now,’ McCraw said.
‘With the benefit of hindsight, from where I am sitting now – of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision. There is no excuse,’ McCraw
A law enforcement official who spoke anonymously to The New York Times said that the border patrol agents who arrived on the scene had been puzzled as to why they were being told not to enter the school and engage the gunman.
McCraw asserted that Pete Arredondo, the district chief, made a miscalculation in assuming the active shooter situation had become a barricade event.
Arredondo, 50, become the focus of backlash from parents wondering if their children could have been saved.
Arredondo, who was born in Uvalde and was elected to city council just days before the massacre, has had an unremarkable career as a cop.
He started his law enforcement career as a 911 dispatcher for Uvalde’s town police department in 1993, and over the course of the next 20 years, worked his way up to eventually assume the role of assistant police chief at the department in 2010.
said.
Experts have described the decision to wait for back up as ‘outdated’ and ‘disgusting’.
‘Waiting an hour is disgusting. If that turns out to be true, then it is a disgusting fact,’ said Sean Burke, a retired school resource officer from Massachusetts who now is the president of the School Safety Advocacy Council.
Texas police said on Thursday night that they didn’t immediately rush in to find the shooter on Tuesday’s attack after being shot at because they feared they might be killed, and even suggested that they deliberately locked the gunman in the classroom – where he murdered 21 people – in order to trap him.
Department of Safety spokesman, Lt. Chris Olivarez, made the astonishing comments during an appearance on CNN on Thursday night.
He was being challenged by Wolf Blitzer over why the first officers who responded to the shooting retreated after Ramos shot at them with his AR-15.
They then waited an hour for tactical SWAT teams to take him out, leaving him alone in a classroom with the 19 fourth graders and two teachers who he murdered.
‘Don’t current best practices, Lieutenant, call for officers to disable a shooter as quickly as possible, regardless of how many officers are actually on site?’ Blitzer asked.
He replied: ‘In the active shooter situation, you want to stop the killing, you want to preserve life.
‘But also one thing that, of course, the American people need to understand is that officers are making entry into this building. They do not know where the gunman is. They are hearing gunshots. They are receiving gunshots.’
He then appeared to try to take credit for the gunman being locked in the classroom with the kids for an hour – including some he shot at the start of the rampage who later died in the hospital – claiming it saved other lives.
Police initially said that the gunman barricaded himself inside the classroom and that they had trouble gaining access to the room, and one unnamed law official anonymously spoke out to say SWAT teams had to wait for a different school staff member to bring them a key to the class.
‘At that point, if they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed, and at that point that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school.
‘So they were able to contain that gunman inside that classroom so that he was not able to go to any other portions of the school to commit any other killings,’ Lt. Olivarez said.